Double Break Gallery artists celebrate year one

Artists Mike Coors and Louis M. Schmidt to hold an anniversary show

Matt Coors and Louis M. Schmidt, the owners of Double Break Gallery (1821 Fifth Ave. in Bankers Hill), are approaching one year in business, and they’re busy (as always) preparing an anniversary show called Good Grief, during which their work will be on display together for the first time.

Coors and Schmidt run the gallery and retail shop while continuing to work on their own art. Both are obsessed with drawing and the use of patterns. Coors’ work in Good Grief—opening from 6 to 10 p.m. Friday, June 22—will include hand drawings juxtaposed with digitally rendered patterns, while Schmidt, who draws 40 to 50 hours each week, will show some of his exclusively hand-drawn pieces.

“Patterning is a metaphor for the way humans organize things in order to cope with the complexity of the world,” Coors says. But for Schmidt, patterns hold a much darker meaning.

“As a kid, I went to Arlington National Cemetery. Witnessing the patterning of headstones in real life, and the power of what they represent, is something that has stayed with me,” he says.

Selections from his series Facies Hippocratia, a Latin term that describes a person’s facial expression before they die, have incredible charcoal layering that creates a patterned, textured effect upon which the haunting heads float. These will hang in the show, alongside Coors’ more lively, colorful work, like “Garden,” which he describes as “an abstracted wallpaper of flowers.”